Two main reasons cited: competition from private sector, and stress of extended deployments. Both sound weird to me.

One - I'd have thought that airlines would want Transport & Bomber pilots much more than Fighter pilots. But fighter pilots may be more appropriate for the private & Corp jet market, which is booming (because of the concentration of wealth).

Two - extended deployments for "fighter" pilots? We've been "at war" for almost 15 years, but we haven't faced an enemy with airplanes since, maybe, the 2nd or 3rd day of Shock & Awe, so what are all those Top Guns doing out there?

Maybe they're counting the A-10; those guys have certainly gotten plenty of action.

But I wouldn't be surprised if there's another effect here: guys (and gals?) who are happy behind the stick on existing planes might not want to deal with the F-35, with its Virtual Reality control system. Or even worse - the plane might not be a good air-to-air fighter, since it's designed to be so many different things.

I heard people recently complaining about the new Aircraft Carrier costing $13B. What bothers me more is that it will cost at least that to fill the ship with F35's (last I hear, they'll cost $130M each, at best).

The specs for the JSF were insane to start with. Like telling someone to design a vehicle to compete in Formula One, Tractor pull, AND the Demolition Derby.

I say give up on it now & go with the drones (and keep making A-10s for the demolition derby).

TTG and Fred
To clarifiy, I was not referring to a
civil war as a WBS conflict. Depending
on your location, the coarseness of
interactions between the general
population is eroding IMO. Road rage,
physical assaults for no apparent reason
have escalted in my neck of the woods.
Random shootings have increased dramatically
since the BLM phenomenon. Downtown
MPLS at bar cloosing is now a near free
for all. The city council has chosen to
limit police response to at times out of
control group gatherings primarily by recinding
the loitering ordinance. Ferguson effect?

I don't know whether you are "Je suis Corse" ou "Je suis un corsicain" but those Corsican militants are playing a double game - on the one hand they claim they would hit back at radical Islamists (good thing AFAIK) but they are also sending the msg to Paris that this is part of their demand for autonomy ( electing nationalists to head the regional government for the first time and a push by local lawmakers to give Corsu equal status with the French language especially in schools).

Before "plastique' was "de rigueur" to settle accounts, whether against authorities or drug dealers taking over some markets or early on against the pieds noirs. Just have to see how some villas are well guarded in some areas in Ajaccio (as if we are in some parts of Sicily). The island has changed a lot in the past 20 years and the s*it disturbers are not only the Italian cousins from Sardaigna or Sicily or the migrants from the Maghreb whose progeniture may turn out to be a Salafist but those "bling bling" crowd coming the continent.

The fighter jocks have been dropping bombs all this time. F-16s, F-18s, and the F-15I are being used heavily for that purpose. A number of pilots have been assigned to fly drones, which must be a real downer for them.

Trump has not described in precise detail how this election will be rigged; this being different than describing how historic elections may have been rigged.

He has implied that minority persons vote repeatedly because there are precincts in minority areas that didn't show even a single vote for a GOP candidate. Then he figuratively winks, while ignoring what are the measures which prevent repeat voting.

Of course, arguing by vague implication, even if the mechanical argument is illogical, can be aimed to suppose vote suppression of legal minority votes is a workable tactic in urban voting precincts in rust belt swing states.

It seems we have moved from "hard times require harder men" to "desperate candidates ask for desperate measures."

This seems to suggest that the economically disenfranchised, if in fact those are Trump supporters, are training the cannons of their revolution at their own feet.

Mr. Trump not only is one of those wealthy few, but he has proposed a supply-side tax policy that will pour extra dollars into the pockets of the wealthy few. He has on offer the strange concept that he can fix the rigged economic system run by plutocrats by giving them a lot more money to throw around either the tangible goods or FIRE economies. Trump also is pounding further deregulation hard.

Short of a holocaust, if one is super cynical and super rich, it seems currency arbitrage and other schemes would look very attractive. What I need are cash flows from opaque oligarchies.

The F-35C is actually going to replace the 'legacy' Hornets, F-18 C/D, not the SuperHornet, F-18 E/F. The legacy birds are used primarily for strike missions. The E/F models are much bigger and, while fully capable of strike work, are the air superiority birds on a carrier deck. The upshot is that there will be fewer F-35Cs that one might assume. On the other hand, that means the E/F models will be replaced, in turn, with a new bird in the 2020s.

Coda: The E/F was sold to congress as a mod of the earlier Hornets. In fact it was an almost new aircraft, much bigger, with few exchangeable parts.

Oh, right, the robot menace. They can't even make a robot that can open a real door in a real house without falling over:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TaYhjpOfo
You think the manager at McDonald's is going to shell out $1,000,000 for a robot hamburger flipper which can't clean up the knocked-over garbage can in the parking lot? Do you think a robot can bus tables at a busy restaurant? I'll believe in the robot menace when I get my flying car.

"Maybe not in 20 years but not very after, between additive/3D printing and net molding, the cost of manufacture will be low enough to make avoiding shipping costs of any kind the main driver." Heard that from a French industrialist when I worked for Alcan. I thought then and still do that it was more like 50 years (this was 2009) but it is inevitable. The ultimate Home Depot is where everything is made for you, cars, fridges, clothes, furniture, you name it. Hardly any finished goods inventory, almost no shipping of the same. Sounds a little futuristic but so many other things we use were seen that way.

Labor will be minuscule. What better way to evaporate another country's labor advantages than to not need it at all?

An op-ed by "Admiral Stavridis" who was "the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and is Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University". Certainly very lawful and diplomatic.http://time.com/4452328/grand-bargain-russia/
A very interesting bunch of "truths".
Ishmael Zechariah

The ultimate dream is the Star Trek replicator. One can only hope it will be possible.

bks: The burger restaurants are experimenting with robots. There will no doubt be a lot of bugs to work out but the future in business appears to be reduced use of labour and more capital invested in robots.

The advances in Autonomous Systems technology is pretty amazing. Sensors, GPUs & neural network capabilities are increasing at staggering rates. What is probable in 10 years let alone 20 years in autonomous systems is quite mind blowing. The pressure on semi-skilled and even skilled labor will be enormous. Truck drivers, pilots, even many medical procedures will be automated to provide better quality and lower costs. The auto, transportation, freight & package delivery industry is going to be revolutionized in the next 2 decades.

I have read a speculative reason suggested as to why Trump won't release his tax returns. The speculative reason is that he is a whole lot less rich than he claims he is, and the tax returns would show just how much less money he has than what he claims. And part of the "value" of the Trump "brand" is its burnished patina of "sucCESS!" as measured in money owned. And he is afraid that revealing the truth of "less money" would create the image of "less sucCESS!" which would lower his "brand value" which would make it even harder in the future for him to process lots of money through big brand-burnishing projects.

Does the right understand this either? People who identify as being on the right have long believed that people should "work" at a "job" to "earn" the money "needed" to support themselves.

If the March of Automation continues to evaporate millions of jobs, what are the de-jobbed supposed to do to survive? If we continue to believe that people should "work" to "earn" their "keep", will we invent millions of "make work" jobs for people to "work" at so we can all feel they are "earning" their "keep"?

It may not be a burning personal survival issue for me yet because I like to think that the kinds of things I do as a pharmacy technician are hard to all-the-way automate and robotize. But there are millions of people for whom the automation being predicted is a looming threat. What do millions of people do if they come to work and meet a robot sitting in their chair or standing at their workbench and the robot says: " The Industrial Revolution is over. We won."